KALAMAZOO — Marti Fritz has put her heart and soul into St. Luke’s Episcopal Church for 30 years.

She sings in the choir, served twice on the lay board, raised her children in the congregation. Her husband is the church archivist. The ashes of Fritz’s mother and sister are in the church’s memorial wall.

“It’s really my home,” Fritz said of the church.

Right now, it’s a home in turmoil.

In the past two weeks, the bishop has announced he is taking over the church and disbanding its lay board. St. Luke’s rector, the Rev. Jay R. Lawlor, fired half of the church staff, including a beloved music director. A longtime parishioner, Marcia Morrison, is pursuing assault charges against Lawlor for allegedly shoving her after last Sunday’s church service. On Wednesday, Lawlor submitted his resignation.

Handout photoJay Lawlor

Founded in 1837 in downtown Kalamazoo, St. Luke’s is one of the area’s oldest and most prominent congregations, and now its very survival is in question.

“It feels like having my home burn down with all my memories in it,” Fritz said.

Depending on who’s talking, there are two conflicting narratives on how the situation at St. Luke’s reached this point.

Although Lawlor and Episcopal Bishop Robert Gepert declined to be interviewed for this report, church documents detailing their perspectives describe an arrogant congregation set in its ways, living beyond its means and resistant to new leadership.

Some local church members, including Fritz, offer a different story: that of a close-knit church community that struggled with a pastor who lacked interpersonal skills and was indifferent to the needs of his congregation. They say the situation has been exacerbated by a bishop who wields church authority with an iron hand.

Eric Breisach, a Kalamazoo Public Schools board member who has attended St. Luke’s for 40 years, is among those upset with the bishop and Lawlor. He sees the congregants as the victims.

“I’ve never met a more caring or loving group of people,” he said.

But not every parishioner sees it that way. Sara Miller joined St. Luke’s two years ago and was married by Lawlor. She has been a member of the choir, served on the church’s Long-Range Planning Committee and last year organized a college outreach night for college students. She said the issues at St. Luke’s are “older and broader” than the conflicts with Lawlor.

“This is definitely a parish where people want things done a certain way,” she said. “People want different things, and when they don’t get their way, they don’t handle it well.”

Lawlor’s tenure

Jay Lawlor arrived at St. Luke’s in June 2009. He was an intellectual who had written books about how Christians should address global poverty. He was coming into a well-educated, well-heeled parish with a social conscious. It seemed a good fit.

But there were conflicts almost from the start, based on documents the diocese office recently provided parishioners, including a 20-page journal kept by Lawlor.

Lawlor was critical of the church’s bookkeeping and its finances. He thought the church’s lay leaders — the 12-member vestry — overstepped their authority. The “St. Luke’s way,” Lawlor wrote the bishop, was not necessarily the way an Episcopal church should run, but members resented and resisted change. He painted the movers and shakers as arrogant and unyielding.

“St. Luke’s is a system where leadership is expected to assimilate into the system,” Lawlor wrote. “St. Luke’s is an unforgiving system where mistakes are capitalized on, magnified and ‘kept alive’ well past the event — even after a proper apology.”

In turn, there were complaints about Lawlor’s leadership and pastoral care.

During Lawlor’s 18-month tenure, more than 140 parishioners wrote to Lawlor, the bishop or the vestry about the rector. There were many complaints: A funeral that seemed too perfunctory; the rector’s failure to provide communion for shut-ins or visit people in the hospital; the time the associate minister was ill and Lawlor, who was on vacation but in town, refused to step in for the Sunday service; the elimination of the church’s Saturday evening service, when Lawlor said attending church didn’t need to be convenient.

Hall recalled the time his grandson was hospitalized for nine days with a collapsed lung. The youngster was an acolyte at the church, and his mother was Lawlor’s first religious education director. Yet Lawlor never contacted the family during the boy’s illness.

“There’s many stories of that sort,” Hall said.

Not everyone disliked Lawlor. “I found him very pleasant, very soft-spoken and self-effacing,” Miller said.

Miller said that, from what she saw, the conflict was basically a power struggle.

“It was about who was in charge,” she said. “There was a lack of yielding on both sides.”

Seeking solutions

Last fall, church leaders turned to the bishop for resolution and he called in an investigative team.

But St. Luke’s had an ongoing dispute with the diocese over two matters — the church’s contribution toward diocese operations and the diocese’s requirement for using a certain health insurance plan for church employees — and that appeared to color the investigation.

Last month, four members of the vestry met with diocesan officials. The group, which included Fritz, stressed what they saw as Lawlor’s ineffective leadership and pastoral care. Based on documents from the diocese, Lawlor and the diocesan officials focused more on the financial issues and the church’s battles with the diocese.

A major point of concern highlighted by the bishop: He said the church had been consistently showing a deficit in its operating budget; between 2000 and 2009, the church’s operating deficit collectively totaled more than $500,000.

However, financial records show a more complicated picture once gifts and investment income are added in.

In 2008, for instance, the church had a $56,000 deficit in its $634,000 operating budget, but total church revenues that year were $1.5 million and total expenditures were $830,000. In 2010, total revenue was $1.3 million, expenditures were $803,757 and the $630,650 operating budget was balanced for the first time in years.

“Actually, we balanced the budget in 2010 using the same resources that we’ve used in other years — we just recorded it in a different way,” said Ben Jamieson, church treasurer. “We’re a reasonably healthy church” in terms of finances.

While pledges for 2011 are down substantially — 122 pledges totaling $229,000 compared to 181 pledges totaling $452,000 in 2010 — the congregation had $1.9 million in investments at the end of 2010, its highest total ever.

Lawlor’s compensation package in 2010 was $125,000, which included $85,000 in salary, plus benefits and housing.

Making changes

On March 2, the bishop sent a five-page letter to St. Luke’s members outlining his “Godly judgment”: He was putting Lawlor on four-month paid leave, and the bishop would head the congregation for now with a lay board that he appointed.

“The removal of the rector would be a simple fix,” Gepert wrote, “but that would neither restore the congregation to the past nor form you into an authentic community based on cooperation, mutual caring, forgiveness and accountability.”

The letter rebukes the church community for “retribution, name-calling and dissent” and adds: “Some of you might feel compelled to leave the congregation and, if that’s what you choose, may God bless your journey.”

The letter also said the parish staff was being downsized as a result of the drop in pledges. On March 3, Lawlor laid off the church secretary, the facilities manager and the music director, effectively immediately.

The loss of the music director — and Lawlor’s announcement there would be no music during Sunday’s services — was seen as a particularly harsh blow for a church with a large choir and a long history of music in their worship service.

Moreover, considering the church’s financial resources, “there was no reason for drastic action,” said John Fink, a Kalamazoo College math professor who headed the vestry before it was disbanded last week.

Many members of the congregation were stunned by Gepert’s actions, although Fritz and Fink said the bishop has a reputation for overseeing parishes with an iron fist. Last summer, Gepert executed a similar takeover of his largest congregation, Grace Episcopal Church in Grand Rapids, the church where former President Gerald Ford was married.

“If you were to look at the story of what happened to Grace, you could substitute the words, ‘St. Luke’s,’ and you wouldn’t have to change anything else in the story,” Fink said.

March service

There was a large turnout at last Sunday’s service, as people came to hear more about the changes. There was palpable tension between Lawlor and the congregation and, at the end of the service, members stood up and sang, “The Church’s One Foundation” — all five verses.

Afterwards, congregants went up to Lawlor to give him a piece of their mind. One of them was 76-year-old Marcia Morrison, whose family owns Morrison Jewelers downtown and is a decades-long member of St. Luke’s. She told Lawlor the bishop’s takeover and the staff layoffs were “unconscionable” and then stepped aside as another congregant, Thomas Folkert, approached Lawlor and got into a heated conversation.

Lawlor stalked away from Folkert, but in the process, witnesses say, he used his arm to shove Morrison out of the way. He pushed her hard enough that Morrison stumbled back for several feet before she caught hold of a pew.

Breisach witnessed the incident, and said he was shocked that Lawlor was so forceful in his push — and that he didn’t stop to apologize or see if Morrison was hurt. “Jay literally ran off,” Breisach said.

Morrison and several witnesses went that afternoon to the Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety to file a police report for assault and battery against Lawlor. According to the police report, Lawlor said Morrison bumped into him and witnesses are “lying” about a shove.

Fritz was among those shocked by the incident involving Lawlor and Morrison, but also expressed some sympathy for the priest.

“However I feel about Jay Lawlor as a priest,” she said, “think about the situation he was in — he was told to summarily dismiss part of the staff and go back and face everybody for one last Sunday, a whole church full of people who were upset and angry.

“What a horrible thing for him. Why would the bishop put him in that position?”

On Wednesday, a week after his first letter, Gepert sent another letter to members of St. Luke’s, and this one took a much more conciliatory tone.

Lawlor had resigned, the bishop wrote, and the incident involving Morrison would be investigated by the diocese.

“I will work to make sure there is some kind of music for our worship on Sundays,” Gepert wrote. “I hope that in spite of all the changes, the feelings of sorrow, anger and grief, we can work toward a new normalcy.”

Congregants are cautiously optimistic.

“We are what we are,” Breisach said. “There’s an awful lot of people who want to move forward and restore the health and vitality of our parish.”